28 August—Saint Augustine, Bishop of Hippo died on this day in 1595 years ago (that’s 430 AD), so naturally it’s his feast day. He’s the patron saint of printers, theologians, and converts to Christianity. The Monitor celebrated his 1668^th birthday with a day-late disquisition on 14 November 2022. So here it is again, to fortify your appreciation of the great man. With minor emendation, as appropriate. And on his proper feast day:

Although Augustine of Hippo was quite a respected Latin teacher and theologian, most of us remember him fondly and primarily (only?) for his heart-wrenching supplication to God, as he tells us in his “Confessions”: “Da mihi castitatem et continentiam, sed noli modo.” What Latin! What a guy!

What a guy indeed. Augustine’s family were North African Berbers. But they were quite Romanized, so they likely spoke Latin at home. Except perhaps when parents Monica and Patricius didn’t want little Gus and brother Navigius and sister Perpetua to know what they were talking about. (In the Rosenberg household Yiddish was the language for parental secrets. Our everyday language was Latin.)

Mother Monica was canonized herself, by the way, in part, we’re told, because husband Pat—a pagan who allegedly converted to Christianity on his deathbed (like so many people, we’re told)—tended to screw around. We’ve all heard of Santa Monica.

Since the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, Augustine started sowing his wild oats (but not mixing metaphors) as a teenager and, ignoring his saintly mama’s admonitions, took up with a girl in Carthage. Santa Monica had wanted her brilliant son to avoid fornication (what mother wouldn’t?) and marry a person of at least his own class (what mother wouldn’t?).

Evidently, though, Augustine and his concubine (a.k.a. inamorata) had read a leaked copy of Clarence Thomas’s infamous Dobbs concurring opinion and didn’t take precautions. So when Gus was 18 he found himself father to a son, Adeodatus. Adeodatus means Gift of God in Latin, like Theodore in Greek, which language Augustine the Latin belles-lettrist wasn’t too comfortable in.

To his credit, Augustine maintained a presumably cordial relationship with his son’s mother for 15 years and confessed that he felt guilty when, no fool he, he decided to marry a teen-aged heiress. Kind of like . . . no, I won’t go there. Teen-aged like eleven years old, by the way. And Gus felt guilty when he broke off that engagement, too.

But Augustine jilted his prepubescent heiress only because he had decided to become a priest and by that time celibacy had begun to infect the Roman Catholic priesthood. Go figure. The church and Augustine. Like so many people then and now, Gus seems to have regarded his family-way relationship as equivalent to marriage. To prove his point, he wrote that it produced a decreased sensitivity to pain. He also confessed that, rather than a lover of marriage, as he put it, he was a slave to lust. Evidently a happy, enthusiastic slave.

But the fun ended when Augustine was 31, just about the time he got himself baptized, when, as he put it rather obliquely in Latin, he was “roused to a desire for wisdom, yet still was delaying to reject mere worldly happiness.” And he hadn’t even been thinking of the priesthood at the time.

But that’s when Augustine begged God in the most elegant Latin, “Da mihi castitatem et continentiam, sed noli modo.” In English, we’d put it, “Give me chastity and self-control. But not yet.”

It sounds so much better in Latin. Doesn’t everything? And it’s God’s favorite language. In all events, we don’t know if Augustine actually gave up the flesh in favor of celibate wisdom, as it were, except that he told us he did. And if you can’t believe a saint, whom can you believe?

Incidentally, Saint Augustine of Hippo is not to be confused with Saint Augustine of Canterbury. That Augustine’s claims to fame are that he was the first Archbishop of Canterbury and that Austin cars are named after him. The current Austin car, called the Arrow, is a battery-electric retro-style fair-weather (i.e., topless) roadster that isn’t yet street-legal in the United States.

Da mihi patientiam . . .